The greatest possible musical freedom, ecstasy and spirituality. Previously: Filippou/Heuken/Tanrikulu.

Drummer Max Andrzejewski and saxophonist Johannes Schleiermacher have long been among the old and young of the Berlin jazz scene. With numerous separate as well as joint projects, they constantly prove anew that jazz is always at its most impressive when it represents precisely that which did not exist immediately before. Routine is alien to them; with each new band they are right back at the beginning again. Andrzejewski celebrates joyful surf jazz with Expressway Sketches and extends the noise claws with the duo Pranke. Schleiermacher is part of the Andromeda Mega Express Orchestra and tests the boundaries between krautrock, trance jazz and various traditions of North African music with the ensemble Onom Agemo & The Disco Jumpers, to name just a few activities. In Andrzejewski's band Hütte, they most recently bowed together to British song poet Robert Wyatt.

So breaking new ground is in the DNA of these two men of conviction. So it's hardly surprising that they once again go to extremes with their new band TRAINING. TRAINING is less about formulating common intersections of opposites, but about living out contrasts in all their poetic incompatibility and their unification in turbulent streams of consciousness. The duo's idioms range from minimal music to a kind of digital folklore to ecstatic free jazz outbursts. Autechre meets Archie Shepp. They don't limit themselves to woodwind and percussion instruments, but also romp around on synthesizers and electronics. The debut EP "*x EP", released at the end of 2020, reveals a logic that follows less the regularities of musical stringency than the unpredictable yet compelling randomness of everyday life. Each playful situation is wrested from the memory of a concrete moment of a few seconds. The sometimes completely different intentions of Schleiermacher and Andrzejewski often merge into each other so inseparably that it is hardly possible to clearly identify which impulse goes back to whom. 

With Deerhoof guitarist John Diete- rich, TRAINING not only thrilled the audience at the Jazzfest Berlin, where the project premiered in 2020 together with Işıl Karataş, but an album will also be created in this constellation.

Also in Leipzig, the symbiotic duo performs with video artist Işıl Karataş, who is also a research associate at the Institute of European Ethnology at the University of Vienna and one of the leaders of the transdisciplinary Studio Audio Visual Research group.Her videos, also based on two- to five-second snippets, counteract the acoustic contrasts of the two instrumentalists and turn an inaudible performance into an audiovisual spectacle.